Return to Sender

by
Kim Petersen

Dissident Voice

May
22, 2003

Now
that things are hunky-dory enough on the Iraqi front, intrepid NY Times writer
Thomas Friedman can be chaperoned around the new US “baby,” as Mr. Friedman
recently refers to the cradle of civilization.However, in Mr. Friedman’s first postcard from Iraq he notes how it has
been blown back to its Mesopotamian cradle in a “contest [that] was surely one
of the most unequal wars in the history of warfare. In socioeconomic terms, we
were at war with the Flintstones.” (1)

Mr.
Friedman gleefully revels that the “Iraqis are so beaten down that a vast
majority clearly seem ready to give the Americans a chance to make this a
better place.” In fact this is the “best thing” about the poverty of the
Iraqis: submission out of penury.

It
would be interesting to know who is this “vast majority” Mr. Friedman crows
about and what is his polling methodology? The "vast majority"
couldn’t be the 4,900 to 6,500
civilians killed or their surviving next-of-kin. It certainly can’t be from
the thousands of demonstrators asking the US forces to return to where they
came from. It got so unsettling for some of the US troops that they gunned down
the civilian demonstrators in Mosul and Fallujah. Could it be that the folks
still without regular electricity and potable water are still pinning their
hopes on Uncle Sam? Or could the support possibly be coming from patients
unable to be adequately cared for in the hospitals, since looted of whatever
was or wasn’t nailed down? Could it be from the people who have witnessed their
country ransacked to the bone, aided by the sometimes participating occupiers?

As
the insightful Noam Chomsky pointed out, “[T]he United States is now regarded
as the greatest threat to peace in the world by probably the vast majority of
the population of the world. George Bush has succeeded within a year in
converting the United States to a country that is greatly feared, disliked, and
even hated.” (2) Yet somehow Mr. Friedman would ask us to
believe that a country knocked back to the Stone Age by US-UK sanctions and a
barrage of weapons, many illegal, used without regard for the civilian
population is willing to give the US the benefit-of-the-doubt whereas the rest
of the world’s people won’t. Sounds fanciful.

As
for the Shiite majority, well Mr Friedman describes a “huge throng of Iraqi
Shiites” exuberantly welcoming exiled Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim back to
Iraq. He notes a “a similar energy, without the religious fervor” among the
Kurdish visitors and Iraqi National Congress aides of convicted criminal Ahmed
Chalabi. It is not strange that Israeli inamorato Mr. Friedman would be so
appreciative of Zionist-approved Mr. Chalabi. But there was no mention of a
“huge throng” for Mr. Chalabi. Sure his few aides show some energy, and why
not. They are about to cash in.

Mr.
Friedman surmises some more: He figures that of the 60 percent of Iraqis who
are Shiite that “maybe 30 percent would favor a Khomeini-like Islamic republic.
That's only 18 percent of the country. As such, two things seem clear: the next
president of Iraq will be Shiite, and Iraq will not be Iran.” Maybe so, but if
true democracy will be allowed to take hold then it will most likely have a
Muslim flavor. But from where does Mr. Friedman pull his “30 percent”
guesstimate?

Mr.
Friedman ends with a quote from a US general who when asked if the US can
manage Iraq says: “It is doable -- I just don't know if we can do it.”Judging by how events are proceeding in
Afghanistan and with the history of US involvement there and the Middle East,
things don’t bode well.